A New Wrinkle in Fantasy: Anne Nesbet’s The Wrinkled Crown

Science and magic would appear to be strange bedfellows. But that doesn’t stop writers from combining the two. Star Trek made use numerous magical cultures whose worldview clashed with the scientific culture on the Enterprise, and we’re all familiar with how all the tech toys in Star Wars meant little without the Force to offer an intuitive, magical alternative to science.

At a recent gathering at Pegasus Books in Berkeley, Ms. Nesbet mentioned how the dynamic tension between magic and science played an important role in her story. So as I plunged into her longish (381 pp.) middle grade fantasy, I was expecting something more or less familiar. What I got was something familiar, yes, but also delightfully different. The Wrinkled Crown isn’t sci fi, nor is it fantasy disguised as sci fi. Instead, it’s really an exploration of place, as seen the lens of a girl. And that place is as wildly original as any created world anywhere.

A key word in the story comes right from its title: wrinkled. More than just another word for magic, it also refers to the quality of place, the hill country where young Linny grows up. That quality gets mapped into the minds of people who go there, so that even those who live there are likely to be overwhelmed by illness if they wander too far into areas where the wrinkles dominate the land. Linny has an uncanny ability to navigate through wrinkled places, but that ability gets severely tested when she inadvertently sends her best friend to Away, a place so wrinkled that even Linny can’t go there.

To try to save her, Linny undertakes a perilous journey to the Plain, a place divided into warring camps: those who defend wrinkled reality, and Surveyors who want to stamp it out. While Nesbet presents the Surveyors unsympathetically, she also shows some of the wrinkled rebels to be less than ethical in their dealings as well. While running from members of both sides, Linny finds her animal familiar: Half-Cat, a determined, aloof-yet-loyal, multitalented feline. Half-Cat’s right eye is actually a light, and though her origin isn’t explained, it’s obvious that she is both animal and machine—wrinkled and unwrinkled.

[ALERT! SPOILERS AHEAD!]

Linny goes through a number of hair-raising escapes from Wrinkled and Plain people alike, including a harrowing journey through a maze of underground tunnels she navigates by smell alone. When she emerges, it’s right into a huge celebratory gathering of people, the one time of year when Wrinkled and Plain put down their antipathy and commingle. Linny appears to win over the crowd, who see her as the manifestation of a girl who, the stories say, will wear the Wrinkled Crown and unite the country. But Linny can’t follow this path—yet (perhaps in a sequel?). She still must save her friend Sayra, lost in Away.

I won’t go into all the details here, except to say that Linny escapes back to the wrinkled hills and finds a way to bring her friend back, while thwarting the plans of a crazy Plain man trying to tap into the extreme wrinkledness (wrinkletude? wrinkality?) at the edge of Away in order to bring unlimited energy to the Plain. The analogy to our world here is pretty obvious, because his method would also destroy wrinkles and flatten reality, an unthinkable catastrophe. Nuclear energy, the Keystone Pipeline, Global Warming—suffice it to say we have plenty of ways of flattening reality, too.

Nesbet clearly believes, though, that both Wrinkled and Plain are necessary for balance, and by analogy, so are magic/faith/spirituality and science. As such, The Wrinkled Crown functions as a parable. While the world she paints isn’t a dystopia, really, it has a stripped-down quality (oddly enough, though Linny discovers maps and how useful they are, the book itself doesn’t come with a map) that reminds me of Lois Lowry’s The Giver (reviewed elsewhere here).

Then there’s that word: Wrinkled. I’m sure that this word didn’t just pop into Nesbet’s head by accident. Madeleine l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time comes immediately to mind. But there’s more to it than that, I think. Wrinkled skin, wrinkled clothes—wrinkles are things we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Our brains are wrinkled—without all those folds, we would lack consciousness itself. And oddly enough, wrinkles have been used by physicists and mathematicians to describe dimensions and space itself. Cosmetologist George Smoot even wrote a book about the origins of the Universe, Wrinkles in Time. Several times in her story, Nesbet presents the possibility that Linny’s world may be like a bubble that could pop and disappear—a prospect that comes straight out of contemporary multiverse theory.

Let’s hope our own world doesn’t do the same. In the meantime, I plan to take plenty of walks on the wrinkled paths in my own neck of the woods.

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Is This the Sequel You’re Looking For?

Star Wars VII blasts into a post-Lucas galaxy that’s far far away, but all too familiar

By sheer force of numbers, A New Hope (whoops, I mean The Force Awakens) has taken the country of multiplexes by storm. Fans are flocking to the new sequel-that’s-not-a-prequel, critics offer a few light verbal jabs before applauding the film for its freshness and lightness of spirit, and even nonbelievers in the Star Wars canon are admitting that the movie has merit for its entertainment values. Virtually everyone I know who’s seen it has liked it. So despite the fact that I had to shell out an extra 5 bucks because the only seats available were in 3D, I was prepared to like it as well—considering that, back in the day, I thought the original series—especially when Han and Leia’s verbal jabs were more entertaining than swooshing light sabers—to be jolly good fun.

But Han and Leia were a lot older for this one. And though Han could still do that world-weary twinkle in his eye, his age showed. The two newcomers who replaced them as stars—the orphan junk dealer Rey and renegade soldier Finn—come off as much more serious, despite Finn’s occasional comic lines. Rey is scrappy (she works collecting scrapped parts—get it?) and determined and somehow strong with the Force, though we’re never told how she managed to swing that. She also wears the same expression on her face, a kind of blank stare, for virtually the entire movie. Finn is more interesting, but I had a hard time buying his running away from the army when the army had programmed his entire life up until that point. Not that he’d chicken out when it came time for him to kill innocent people—that’s a visceral, instinctive reaction to war. But he’s still just a number, and he only knows people as numbers. How’s he supposed to suddenly decide that he’s got a name—and a desire for freedom–unless someone has planted those seeds in his mind? And this film never shows that side of his backstory.

When these two get together, any chance for developing a relationship with nuance gets blasted away in withering tie fighter tracers and explosions. So here I’m going to go all grumpy on y’all and say that, back in the day, dodging tie fighter tracers and explosions was exhilarating fun. This time after just a few tie fighter tracers and explosions on a much-too-close 3D screen I had had enough, thank you. Yet that was just the beginning. The Force Awakens thus settles into the comfortable and peculiarly American movie diet of loud fast blow ‘em up shoot ‘em up chase scenes that for some reason Hollywood has decided every red-blooded citizen has to enjoy.

Otherwise, like Rey herself, director J.J. Abrams played the scavenger, ripping off chunks of the original Star Wars series and jamming them into his story. Apologists for this call this a nodding tribute to the original tale, but I call it lack of imagination. Did we really need another Death Star, only bigger? More Army officers that look straight out of the Third Reich? A bad guy who looks like a bad cross between Palpatine and Voldemort? Tie fighters that haven’t changed in thirty years? Another bar scene with aliens? Same old stormtrooper suits? Another father-son confrontation on a narrow bridge over an endless chasm? And how did the First Order come into being, anyway?
There was one scene that held my interest, a scene that might have revealed much about Rey’s character had it been explored further. Wandering into the basement of Maz Kanata’s castle, she stumbles on Luke Skywalker’s light saber stored in a box like a religious artifact. After opening the box she’s overwhelmed by eerie sounds and a flashback of herself as a child when her parents are wrenched from her. Had she stumbled on a powerful manifestation of the Force? Would we be granted access to her past and gain insight into what she believes and what motivates her? Perhaps a spiritual awakening, or a great fear would be unleashed on her? And what did it have to do with Luke’s light saber? Unfortunately, the scene ended quickly and Rey seemed untroubled and unchanged by the experience.

Perhaps—but it’s never even hinted as such—this experience enabled her to use the Force, which Luke only learned after numerous lessons from the venerable Yoda (here missing, alas). Because, guess what, she uses the Force to get her stuck-in-the-snow light saber to return to her hand just in the nick of time. Just like Luke.

So maybe in VIII, Rey will turn to the franchise writers and using her best Jedi mind control voice, say “You will unshackle your own creative bonds and do something truly different this time.”

POSTSCRIPT

I wrote this about a month ago and some…force (ahem) kept me from posting it. Could it be Disney himself? Or the threat of legions of TFA followers casting aspersions my way? But now I’ve decided to do the right thing and post it.

I do have one last meme to explore here: Kylo Ren’s cool new light saber. It dawned on me that this young, disturbed villain carried a Christian symbol, since the two crossguards shine red like the shaft. This can’t have been coincidence, and has been noticed by others on the Internet. The red color gives the saber a certain demonic quality, contrasting with Luke’s “pure white” light saber. What does this symbolism intend?

Christians may see it as symbolizing the anti-Christ, though I wouldn’t go that far. It could be a not-so-subtle comment, in visual form, that any religion taken to extremes leads to evil–Muslim, Christian, or Judaism, take your pick. “Christian Soldiers” has all to often been taken literally, leading to behavior directly antithetical to the teachings of Christ.

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Joe Campbell’s Mythic Soup

I have it on the authority of one George Lucas that Joseph Campbell’s magnum opus, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is the ultimate blueprint for those who wish to fuse contemporary fiction with the timeless tales of the ancients. Since my many-twisted tale Kid Midas involves a teenage boy with issues who wants to be a hero and does so while getting tangled up with the gods of ancient Greece, I decided to consult Campbell to see what he had to saw about the matter. What I found was by turns enlightening, entertaining, and baffling.

The part most apropos to my purposes was his exploration of what he termed the Monomyth, in which he maps out the various archetypal stages a hero typically must pass through in order to complete his or her adventure. I won’t go into details, but it was pretty clear to me that Lucas applied much of this to his original (NOT the insipid prequel) Star Wars trilogy. The stages should all ring a bell: the hero is called to an adventure, at first refuses it, but then with supernatural aid commits to it and crosses the threshold into a different reality (the Underworld, Faerie, etc.). He battles demons, dragons, guardians, and other monsters, and is either crucified, dismembered, or abducted deeper into the pit, where with helpers he finds atonement and either steals an “elixir” or is given something of great value; he is then either rescued or resurrected after a chase scene, and crosses back into normal reality carrying the elixir that he uses for the benefit of the greater good.

I applied my own story line to this map and found that it actually followed the Monomyth pretty well, though my story is more of a family drama than one about a superhero or prince with high political or social stakes.

While the Monomyth is necessarily simplistic, Campbell does a great job showing how myths from different cultures fit the pattern in different ways. I found myself fascinated how he found common themes running through ancient epics and Maori folk tales, for example. He spends as much time delving into the heroic aspects of Buddha, Krishna, and other Eastern divinities as he does classical Western pagan gods and heroes. Everything he does is carefully footnoted, and he has an extensive bibliography. Clearly, he spent an enormous amount of time researching, connecting, and condensing this material.

Campbell is more than just an academic star. Though he died 27 years ago, thanks in part to a PBS interview with Bill Moyer he continues to this day to exert considerable influence on creative artists and thinkers, and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as such luminaries as Carl Jung. His writing can be astoundingly absorbing, and even amusing.

And yet…at times I found myself scratching my head as I tried to decipher a particular way he tries to apply poetics to sophisticated psycho/metaphysical concepts, resulting in something that sounds like it came out of an academic committee: “The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into the unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world.”

In general, Campbell is less successful at wrestling these tales into academic pigeon-holes as he is sticking to the stories themselves and how they relate to our cultural commonalities. Fortunately for us, he is quite successful at achieving the latter.

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